The Online Glorification of OnlyFans and Sex Work: How it Perpetuates Sexual Objectification and Harms Disadvantaged Sex Workers
Romilly Anderson discusses the harms of glorifying OnlyFans and sex work online.
Image Credit: Carly Earl / The Guardian
How dangerous is it to ignore the implications of glorifying online sex work?
OnlyFans, an online platform where creators produce content for subscribers, most of which includes videos containing sex and sexually explicit behaviour, has soared in popularity over the last few years. Influxes of comments can be seen under young women’s Instagram and TikTok posts asking how to find them on “other sites”. More and more young women are starting OnlyFans accounts, fuelled by an online rhetoric that this is an empowering way to make a lot of money, fast.
Prominent female OnlyFans stars such as Lily Phillips and Ari Kytsya talk online about how much they enjoy their content creation and the fact that men pay for their lifestyles. Kytsya, who has become more popular recently thanks to her likeable personality and refreshing transparency, has consistently stressed in Instagram Q&A videos that she does not believe young women should take her job lightly, and talks openly about the risks and downsides. However, Kytsya is largely alone in her honesty, and it is not enough to combat the glamorisation and glorification of self-employed sex work that has grown online. A deeper delve into the glorification of OnlyFans and sex work shows how it perpetuates sexual violence, the sexual objectification of women, and harms disadvantaged sex workers who have been forced into the industry.
In October 2024, 23-year-old Lily Phillips infamously achieved her goal of sleeping with 100 men in a day as video content for her OnlyFans, sparking conversations about the morality of online sex work. In a YouTube documentary following Phillips in the weeks before, during, and after the making of her video, created by YouTuber Josh Pieters, Phillips discusses her work and gives an insight into her views and experiences regarding the sex industry. Throughout the documentary, she stresses that she does OnlyFans as a job because it is her “fantasy” and having a lot of sex was something she was doing already at university, which is when she started her career.
While answering questions from Pieters in her home in affluent West London, Phillips openly states that she earns as much as £300 from five-minute video calls with fans, and £500 for ten minutes. She says she feels good about making money off the fact that men sexualise her and feels as though this is to her advantage. She goes on to say that she knows she is “part of the problem”, implying that she understands she perpetuates the sexualisation not only of herself but of other women and acknowledges that some men may, as a result of watching her content, expect other women to be as sexual as her and do extreme “stuff” like she does, that isn’t “real life sex”, as she puts it. “Stuff” in this context refers to sexual activity catered to the desires of men, which she enacts in videos made for OnlyFans subscribers.
Sexual Violence and the Perpetuation of Objectification
Videos by young women on OnlyFans are tailor-made to the requests of (mostly) male consumers and often reflect inappropriate or violent desires, which can perpetuate beliefs that women in real life will be similarly eager to partake in fulfilling these desires. This increases sexual violence against women. An example of this is the issue of women experiencing unwanted erotic asphyxiation (being choked during sex) because of assumptions, developed through engagement with pornography, that they will enjoy it. Done improperly, prolonged choking can lead to serious injuries such as cardiac arrest and brain damage. Even if no injury occurs, the experience of being unexpectedly choked without prior consent can be significantly distressing. Young women in particular may feel confused as to whether this is normal, and feel unable to express their discomfort in attempts not to upset sexual partners. So, sexual content creation which perpetuates such behaviour has physically dangerous consequences for women.
The rhetoric of sex work as empowering and as something from which to make money with ease also ignores the wider implications for women, not just in the sex industry but everywhere, being seen as tools for sexual gratification. Studies show that men and boys who consume pornography are more likely to objectify and be violent towards women, as women are seen as objects whose purpose is to sexually satisfy men.
Another OnlyFans star who appears in Josh Pieter’s documentary, Alex Le Tissier, talks about how she feels objectified because of her job: “When you sign up to objectifying yourself… no one is going to see you as a human… it gets to the point where everyone objectifies you”. Phillips also says in the documentary that she faces people talking constantly about her body. She feels people think less of her because of what she does, have negative preconceptions about her before getting to know her as a person, and only see her as a sex worker. Even for Phillips, who chooses to do this work and emphasises how enjoyable it is, it seems like there is damage done to her self-esteem by the level of objectification she experiences.
Sex work is not a form of empowerment. A select few women like Lily Phillips may benefit monetarily from OnlyFans, feeling empowered in profiting off men’s sexualisation of women. However, while top creators can make millions per month, the majority of women on OnlyFans earn just $150-180 per month, which is far less than minimum wage and certainly far less than what is being advertised by OnlyFans stars online. Catering to this sexualisation only perpetuates the sexual objectification of women in wider society and benefits male consumers, for who more and more content is being created by young women who consume this online glorification of sex work.
The Entrapment of Disadvantaged Sex Workers and how OnlyFans Harms Them Further
The popularity of sex work through platforms like OnlyFans has implications for marginalised sex workers who have been forced into the industry, and whose experiences are disregarded in the conversation about sex work as “empowering”. Whilst sex work is often a choice for those who start on OnlyFans, as shown by Lily Phillips, many women face no choice but to sell sex in order to make enough money to survive. It’s important to understand the difference between supporting sex workers, and supporting sex work.
Juno Mac, a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University, speaks in a TED talk about the difficulties sex workers face. Firstly, sex workers are most often forced into the industry due to financial difficulties and other forms of social exclusion, often against their will. These workers largely come from minority groups who already face difficulties and discrimination, such as black women, migrants, people with disabilities and transgender women. Mac discusses how these women already suffer at the hands of prohibition laws imposed on sex work, becoming trapped in selling sex as a result. This sounds complicated and confusingly counterintuitive, but outlining the different prohibition laws used and their consequences can help us understand why this happens. In her TED talk, Mac explains full criminalisation, partial criminalisation and the Nordic Model.
Full criminalisation means that buying and selling sex is illegal, as well as third party involvement (management like brothel keeping or soliciting, more commonly referred to as “pimping”). This means sex workers often end up with criminal records, which stop them from being able to get a legal job and force them to keep doing sex work. Partial criminalisation, which we have in the UK, means buying and selling sex is legal, but soliciting and brothel keeping, the latter defined as two or more sex workers working in the same place at the same time, is illegal. This means women have to work alone, which according to SWARM North (a sex worker-led collective based in the North of England) has proven to be significantly more unsafe. Prohibition laws where only buyers are criminalised (often known as the ‘Nordic Model’) force workers to lower their prices so clients will be less reluctant to take the risk of being arrested. This shows how inescapable sex work is to those who have no other choice. Whilst OnlyFans stars such as Lily Phillips are able to make decisions about how and when they work, for many women, this is not the case, and perpetuating myths about sex work as empowering conceals the experiences of these women.
Moving to OnlyFans for a safer way to sell sex, and because of the platform’s growing popularity with consumers who previously would have sought out in-person sex, is not possible for many of these workers, as sex worker Tilly Lawless explains in an article written for The Guardian. OnlyFans was originally advertised as a platform where women could sell sex on their own terms, an escape from the dangerous conditions of producing content for major porn sites such as PornHub. However, OnlyFans requires creators to provide legal identification if they want to produce sexual content; and marginalised workers like migrants may be unable to do this. OnlyFans also doesn’t want to be associated with the advertising of in person sex work, so it removes the accounts and takes the earnings of creators who it believes may be doing this. This means workers who have previously sold sex in person may have their accounts deactivated if they receive messages from past clients wanting to see them — which OnlyFans will take as evidence that they are selling sex in person.
Most significantly, OnlyFans is largely dominated by big creators, so marginalised workers who don’t have a large platform lose work as a result of the concentration of consumers engaging with just this small number of influencers and not with any other creators.
These are just a few ways in which OnlyFans’ increasing popularity is detrimental to sex workers who have no option of discontinuing sex work due to the consequences of prohibition laws, and must work in order to survive.
The Bottom Line
The glorification of OnlyFans and the presentation of sex work as an empowering way to make a large amount of money is harmful and unrepresentative of the majority of sex workers’ experiences. OnlyFans perpetuates sexual violence and the sexual objectification of women, as well as penalising disadvantaged sex workers who are not able to leave the sex industry and who, as a result of concentrated focus on popular creators, earn less money. Sex work for many means risking their health, safety, and mental well-being at the cost of barely being able to survive, so attributing the success and enjoyment of some to all sex workers is damaging and disregards these experiences.
A concerning number of young women can be seen across platforms promoting OnlyFans accounts as a result of the increasingly prevalent idea that online sex work is empowering, but this is clearly not the case. Myths about sex work as empowering need to be debunked, and the conversation surrounding sex work must shift to one which informs young women of the risks and implications of sex work. The reality of the sex work industry is not something to glorify.
Words by Romilly Anderson
References:
Evidence on pornography’s influence on harmful sexual behaviour among children